Great job, Neo! Kudos for the smoothness of the transition.

Funny, i had just this discussion with a customer of mine: usually i work for banks and other large corporations with datacenters of several hundreds or thousands of (virtualised) servers. This time my customer is a relatively small company with about 50 servers (not virtualised by now) and the job is to transfer the whole datacenter to a new location (another town actually) and introduce virtualisation on the way.

Their first ideas when we had the kick-off work shop were the typical buzzword-bingo: cloud ... blabla ... software storage ... blabla ... Nutanics ... platform as a service ..., etc.

Then i asked a few questions: turns out, they have no idea what a "cloud" is and in fact what they really need is a reliable DevOps system. Their most prominent use case is: they need a test (development, ...) environment for one of their production servers and they want to more or less automatically deploy it. This is exactly what a DevOps system can help you with. My suggestion was to introduce Ansible but also reorganise their environment so that industrialisation and standardisation takes place. No more "hand-crafted one-of-a-kind" server systems but standardised machines with a standardised setup that is easily replicateable.

Next question: their most valuable asset is a large corporate database with a CRM system on top. Do you want to have that somewhere in the internet?
A: "Ah, but we can put a clause regarding this in the contract!"
Q: "Yes - and when this is breached (as has happened to some in the past) you get some refund but the trust of your customers to give you any data is NIL, never to return again and your business model is therefore dead. How much refund do you need to cover for that?"

Cloud services are nice when you need systems for testing for a limited amount of time and you don't want to hold the hardware resources for this. If you need a system to test your new database with meaningless test data then Amazon cloud, Microsoft Azure or whatever else you prefer is for you. If you need a reliable productive system you better have control over every clock cycle the underlying machine offers.

bakunin